Screen Grab from ENGAGEMENTdb Report

Brands are worth billions of dollars to companies, and companies will go to great lengths to protect them offline and online. Type the name of a brand on Google, and your first result is certainly going to be the website of the company who owns it.  The same can’t be said when you search for a brand on Twitter.

No question Twitter is gaining corporate acceptance.  A new Burson-Marsteller and Proof Digital Media analysis found that in 2009, Twitter surpassed blogging as the social media platform of choice — at least among the Fortune 100.  Or take Charlene Li’s ENGAGEMENTdb analysis of the world’s 100 most valuable brands. The most engaged brands like Starbucks, SAP, Toyota and Dell are using it with great success.

At the same time, in searching for the 100 most valuable brands on Twitter, I found roughly 75 percent don’t appear to own the Twitter page that bears their brand name.  And for some of those that do like @thomsonreuters and @amazon, the pages seem generic or worse like @colgate under lock and key. (The words “Welcome to the World of Colgate-Palmolive” don’t seem very welcoming.)

Take McDonalds for example. The top search on Google is, no surprise, a link to the company’s official website. Now type in @McDonalds on Twitter or “Twitter McDonalds” on Google.  Here are the results.

Perhaps we are just in the early stages of Twitter. In time I am sure that will change.  That seems to be the case with Facebook, where increasingly brands are taking ownership of their unofficial pages. And I should add most companies have Twitter sites with some variation of their brand like @BlackBerryCool and @DellOutlet.

Branding Your Twitter: Top Brand Best Practices

How important is branding?  I think a great deal.  Consider @sony. Its page is so generic that @8bitjoystick asked if it was the official Twitter page for Sony.

The cost to make a branded Twitter site seems nominal compared to the $200,000 plus I have read it costs to create a dedicated YouTube Channel.

So which top 100 brands have taken the time to brand their page and provide added utility?

I like the look of @MTV’s background.  They have made the page consistent with its followers.  So has Accenture.  @accenture reinforces the company’s traditional advertising.  @Toyota is not very elaborate, but I like how they lay out other links and identify their Twitter team. At least, @Ford shows their cars.

In the end, I know content and the level of engagement are far more important than the look and feel of your Twitter page. Comcast hasn’t suffered with an @comcast Twitter page out there.  Especially when you have a wildly successful @Comcastcares page.  But as Twitter takes off, we may find brands going after rogue pages more aggressively.

Let me get back to you.